Comment by weeksie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by weeksie | Hacker News Reader

Nice to see the PR campaign for Secret of Our Success getting some traction. It's a fantastic book and Joe Henrich's stuff is super interesting, his thesis is that humans are pretty dumb on our own and culture is like an enormous shared brain that allows us to adapt to hostile environments. Lots of traditions don't make any sense at all, but they're important.

Don't spend as long processing your cassava and you won't notice the effects of the poisoning until a lot later. To you it just seems like you're saving an hour or so per day. If you think about it, being extremely conservative when it comes to tradition has been one of the very best strategies for staying alive up until relatively recently in the human timeline.

ha I was gonna comment this sounds like a book I read recently (since I didn't read TFA because who even does that).

I'm unsatisfied with the cassava and acorn stuff. I get that metabolism is externalized and I get that once it is a cultural practice then that's just how it is. I struggle with envisioning the part in between where the processing is newish and becoming a practice, especially in regards to something like the cassava toxin that doesn't happen until decades later. How does a processing strategy sustain in those early iterations? Versus the animal husbandry practices, they have more immediate results that seem less vulnerable to biases making false causation. I think I struggle with the making sense part of it, what I got from the book is that considering cause is a luxury won by doing it "because I said so".

I'm 100% with you on that, and I have no idea how you'd go about assembling that kind of forensic data.

And for all we know, it still is.

A big part of where I come from, the state of Kerala have been consuming the root for atleast a century. It was our main carbohydrate source. And the process is mostly boiling it in water. I am curious if I am not aware of people getting sick because of this, or the particular variant that was imported in the old times did not have the toxin.

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